Bil Vorndick Expands Mic Collection

Engineer Bil VornDick has added three Crowley and Tripp microphones to his equipment arsenal, according to the manufacturer.

VornDick's two front-end elements—and often the only two front-end elements found on many VornDick recordings—are a great microphone and a great microphone preamp. Now he’s added Crowley and Tripp Studio Vocalist, Soundstage Image and Proscenium ribbon transducers to his collection.

"I saw them at the AES Convention in New York City, and they intrigued me," he recalls. "Any new mic intrigues me, but especially one that is built extremely well, where the sonic curves and frequency responses well match the instruments I record a lot."

After taking them back to his private Nashville recording facility, Mountainside Recording Studio, as well as commercial studios such as Quad, Ocean Way and Masterlink, VornDick became hooked. "Their warmth impressed me," he explains. "They were nice, fat, and warm and sounded good on both acoustic instruments as well as amplified instruments. I've used them on vocals, saxophones, trombones, horns, as well as Marshall and Fender cabinets, and even overheads for drums. The Soundstage Image was used as a single overhead drum image on a psychedelic rock album I'm working on.

"The microphones really shined on dobro," continues VornDick. "The player I was working with has always been sold on another ribbon mic. I set one of these mics up in front of him and he was floored!"

VornDick's preference to capture performances without the use of equalization requires good transducer and preamp technology. "If I EQ anything, I use a highpass filter," he says. "That's pretty much it. And depending on what key the song is in, if there's any overlapping in what I call 'resident dominant frequencies' between acoustic instruments, I'd rather duck frequencies than increase them. For this, the microphones I use are important, and the differences offered by each Crowley and Tripp microphone allow you to really be creative in their application."